Novel approach of pulsed-glow discharge wall conditioning in the ADITYA Upgrade tokamak

In the ADITYA Upgrade tokamak, glow discharge wall conditioning (GDC) is performed regularly during the high-temperature plasma operation cycle using hydrogen (H) and helium (He) gases. H GDC is carried out after long durations (few hours) of plasma operations on every plasma operation day in automatic mode to control oxygen (O) and carbon (C) containing impurities. This leads to high retention of H gas on graphite limiter plates and stainless steel (SS) vessel walls. Subsequently, the high outgassing of H requires a prolonged pumping time and high H recycling during plasma discharges affects the plasma performance in respect to H fueling control of the plasma. To overcome the above-mentioned issues with continuous H GDC for longer durations, a new approach involving pulsed glow discharge wall conditioning (P-GDC) has been introduced in the ADITYA-U tokamak to reduce the residual H and He concentration in SS vessel walls and graphite limiter plates. To facilitate the fast initiation of a discharge in the case of P-GDC, a source of free electrons from a hot filament has been introduced in the vessel. A fast feedback controlled pulsed-gas-fueling system has been developed to initiate a glow discharge in each gas-feed pulse at various operating pressures from 1  ×  10−4 Torr to 10−3 Torr in the presence of an applied DC voltage. The different P-GDC experiments have been carried out with H, He and argon as the working gases and the results are compared with traditional continuous GDC. The P-GDC experiments have been optimized to provide beneficial wall conditioning for plasma operations. In this paper, the design, development and operation of P-GDC has been described along with the preliminary studies of its effect on the measured impurity line radiation during a plasma discharge.